Reply #60: Sometimes it's harder to lose them ...

[Philostopher]

when they're crotchety and opinionated, ain't it?

I lost both my grandmothers before I graduated high school. My dad's mother was one of those 'nice, cooks everything, wears floursack dresses' grandmothers (though she didn't like me -- I looked like my mother, who stole her baby boy!), and I did grieve and miss her.

But I didn't miss her half as much as my mother's mother, who had died a few years earlier. She was a Scots-Irish high school English teacher who eventually became the principal. She'd never planned to have kids, and hadn't even been sure she'd marry until she met my grandfather. She was always disappointed in my mother and aunt, neither of whom ever got a college degree. She was opinionated, outspoken and very intelligent, and I still miss her, and that was a quarter of a century ago. I helped care for her in her declining years -- she was mentally acute, though nearly deaf, until she was 93. Even after that, she had moments of clarity, though most of what she remembered was about gardening and plants. She had a kickass garden right up to that year. She was 96 years old when she died.

My sympathies are with you -- I know how hard it is for families to lose somebody who's been the spiritual leader for a couple of generations. Hang in there!